Stuebeweg50.de

c[h]gars

Technology

I love technology and coding and I have subsequently contributed to several FOSS projects in the past (see my GitHub profile
or the links below ).

Professionally I have been working at the German Node (for data technology) of the INCF where among other projects we have been busy with sharing, hosting, annotation, extraction, databasing and warehousing of large sets of scientific data. I am currently leading a project that provides scientists with a platform to share, host, and publish large scientific datasets . This project is implemented mainly in the go programming language and is heavily inspired by GitHub (hence our motto -inspired by github, flavoured for science).
Another main project of mine, mainly done in Scala, is an abstract management platform for scientific conferences () which has been developed by me and others over the last years.

Furthermore, I enjoy learning new technologies and I regularly explore new things typically centered around some hobbies of mine.

Language wise, my main assets are Go, Python, and Scala. However, I am also somewhat fluent in Java, JavaScript, CC++ and Matlab.

I am using test-driven development methodology on a daily basis and continuous integration/deployment/delivery in most cases based on Travis CI or Gitlab CI is routine for me.

Monitoring and scaling deployments for my projects have been a key responsibility for me for the last years and I am somewhat proud of our uninterrupted service availability, which was achieved by a combination of containerized deployment and self-made DNS based load balancing.

Assets

Leisure

Ever so often I like to take my bike out and rejoice in the beautiful surroundings of Munich. You can find a visualization of roughly 3 years of cycling here.

I am pretty much interested in stories and storytelling. Hand me a good book, be it sci-fi, fantasy, classical literature, history biography or technology and it might be that you won't see or hear from me for quite some hours. I am not only a consumer, though, and I like to express myself in creative writing and spontaneous storytelling. I love to delve into the process of world-building and pretty much enjoy to create, or to analyze interesting and involved narrative structures.

In the spare time left I also like to travel. I especially enjoy exploring new areas and I take a lot of satisfaction from visiting places that are not among the top-notch tourist areas.

Finally, I am enthusiastic electronics hobbyist. I like building small to mid-size thingies based on ICs and microchips. I have created high-frequency stimulation devices for science, small-scale vacuum robots for my flat and hacked smart home devices to get control back to my apartment. For this, I typically use a combination of good old soldering, PCB design with KiCad, low-level (register) programming in C (or c++ in the Arduino cases) and of course a lot of trial and error.

Science

In my scientific studies, I have mainly been interested in understanding how the brain codes, uses and processes color. My attention was mainly focused on projects in flies, rodents, and humans and the results have repeatedly been published in established international journals. As a theoretical neuroscientist, my primary work tools was the computer, algorithms, and math. I have modeled visual systems, analyzed structured and classified massive neuronal datasets, and quantified information transmission capabilities relating natural image statistics to visual system physiology. The Scientific Python Stack, parallelization technologies like MPI or Cuda, as well as image analysis using openCV, have been my companions for the last few years, and I have recently learned a lot about microelectronics and printed circuit boards.

Teaching

Interacting and mentoring smart people is a task I rejoice in. It is therefore not surprising that I have done my fair share of university-level teaching. I have taught introductory courses for programming in c/c++,
Python and mentored classes about numerical simulations of neuronal multi-compartment models. I have also regularly instructed in the G-Node Winter Course on Neural Data Analysis which promotes state-of-the-art methods of neural data analysis among Ph.D. students and postdocs as well as in the Course "Analyse und Modelle in der Neurophysiologie" which is organized by the Deutsche Neurowissenschftliche Gesellschaft. I have also been responsible for the organization and teaching of the exercises for the lecture "Mathematik für Bachelor Studenten" at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich. For the University Freiburg, I have been working as an external lecturer and taught courses in color physiology every once in a while. Last but not least I have repeatedly participated In Google Summer of Code as a mentor for the INCF umbrella organization.